President Donald Trump held court on the White House drive Tuesday, surrounded by the tech moguls who, in their own estimation, hold the planet’s fate in their hands.
Hours earlier, the rising warnings by AI firms took another dark turn with the revelation that Anthropic fears its models pose a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity.” The news came, incongruously, in the prospectus — obtained by Reuters — for a coming IPO that could raise tens of billions of dollars for the cash-hungry company.
The meeting offered a prime moment for presidential leadership of a nation concerned by the new technology’s risks, not least because many of Trump’s guests had been pleading for government regulation.
The response from Trump, whom House Speaker Mike Johnson correctly described as the only person with the clout to bring together such a group, was familiar: a rebrand.
“We’ve changed the name, officially, today. We’ve changed the name officially to SI,” Trump said. “SI instead of AI … You know what that means? ‘Super’ … That’s quite an announcement.” Trump had earlier vowed there would be no slowdown in AI research despite the chilling fears of its inventors. He declared that they’d signed a pledge to “self-police” that was “morally binding.”
The president, a man prone to hyperbole, couldn’t stop gushing about AI. Or SI. “It is the biggest thing there is, maybe the biggest thing there’s ever been,” he said, celebrating his latest attempt to reshape inconvenient political reality with a name change.
If, in years to come, Trump turns out to be correct that fears of AI’s pernicious possibilities are overblown, he could look like a visionary. His belief that AI represents a race for dominance over superpower foe China could deliver a geopolitical victory to the United States. And his argument that over-regulation could strangle an industry critical to America’s economic stability should not be dismissed, given the industry’s importance to future economic growth and wider prosperity.
by CNN – Trump’s blasé attitude toward AI risks backfiring politically
